[TheClimate.Vote] September 8, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Sun Sep 8 09:51:21 EDT 2019
/September 8, 2019/
[CBS gets the situation - video]
*As global temperatures rise, humans at risk from weather extremes*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKa2KldglM
[Not enough time to make money]
*New Oil Projects Won't Pay Off If World Meets Paris Climate Goals,
Report Shows*
Not a single tar sands project is likely to pay back investors under a
2C global warming scenario, Carbon Tracker found.
BY NICHOLAS KUSNETZ
The world's leading oil companies increasingly have argued that they
must be part of the world's transition to a low-carbon future. But a new
report shows that despite their rhetoric, they continue to spend their
money as if that transition may never come.
In just the past year, the biggest global companies committed billions
of dollars to projects that will likely lose money if the world slashes
fossil fuel use fast enough to meet the Paris climate accord goals, the
report, released Thursday night, shows. That poses serious risks to
investors.
"While they may say they support the Paris Agreement, whatever that
means, it's not reflected in their behavior," said Andrew Grant, a
senior analyst at Carbon Tracker Initiative, a financial think tank
focused on energy transition.
In effect, oil companies are giving the world--and their investors--an
either-or proposition: Either their balance sheets go bust when oil
demand plummets, or the world does as warming soars past 2 degrees
Celsius (3.6F). It's one or the other, the report says...
- - -
Not a single tar sands project is likely to pay back investors under a
2C scenario. In fact, they found that because of the great expense of
extracting oil from Canada's tar sands, or oil sands, the projects
wouldn't even pay off under a higher scenario that would lead to nearly
3C of warming. That scenario assumes countries will enact the
commitments they've made under the Paris Agreement but take no more action.
Essentially, Carbon Tracker found that either the days of profitable new
oil sands projects are over or we are headed to a future of dangerous
warming. Despite this, last year ExxonMobil sanctioned a new $2.6
billion project, the first major new oil sands project in years, though
it's already been delayed.
- - -
"Ultimately it comes down to the planet's finite limits,"... In order to
limit warming, only a certain amount of carbon can be emitted, and
therefore only certain amounts of oil and other fuels can be burned.
Meeting the Paris goals will require steep cuts in the use of oil, and
that would necessarily drive down oil prices.
"It pays to consider the implication of those finite limits," Grant
said. "At the moment, I don't see any oil and gas company that includes
those limits in its investment processes."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06092019/oil-stranded-asset-investment-risk-climate-change-paris-agreement-analysis-carbon-tracker
[Yale Climate Connections says]
*Three thought-provoking analogies for climate changeThese comparisons
cast the issue in a new light.*
By using a relatively obvious analogy as an expandable thinking tool,
each of these three inviting essays works its way to some unexpected and
useful insights.
*Bill Moyers, The Guardian, "What if We Covered the Climate Crisis
like We Did the Start of the Second World War?"*
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/22/climate-crisis-ed-murrow-bill-moyers
*John Schwartz, New York Times, "We Went to the Moon. Why Can't We
Solve Climate Change?"*
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/climate/moon-shot-climate-change.html
*Dawn Stover, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "What We Can Learn
about Climate Change from the Titanic"*
https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/64136/
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/09/three-thought-provoking-analogies-for-climate-change/
[Book suggestion]
*To Fight Global Warming, Think More About Systems Than About What You
Consume*
By Bill McKibben
Aug. 28, 2019
- - -
For 10 or 15 years beginning in the 1990s such consumer-driven
environmentalism was a constant refrain, leading to endless disputations
about paper towels and disposable diapers versus sponges and cotton
nappies. When I picked up this book, I feared it might go down the same
cul-de-sacs, but it doesn't, and for the obvious reason: That earlier
campaign was essentially useless...
*INCONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION*
*The Environmental Impacts You Don't Know You Have*
*By Tatiana Schlossberg*
*277 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $28*
To go back to goats for a moment, as Schlossberg says, "it is not the
fault of the consumer that cashmere is cheap, and it's not wrong to want
nice things or to buy them, sometimes. ... It's not within your control
how some company sources and produces its cashmere, or the size of the
herd that they got it from. That should be the corporation's burden … or
governments should make sure they act responsibly."
Governments and corporations, of course, don't do such things
automatically -- they need citizens to push them. But it doesn't require
every citizen to push in order to make change (since apathy cuts both
ways, social scientists estimate that getting 3 or 4 percent of people
involved in a movement is often enough to force systemic change, whereas
if they acted solely as consumers that same number would have relatively
little effect). You can obviously do both, and all of us should try --
but fighting for the Green New Deal makes more mathematical sense than
trying to take on the planet one commodity at a time...
- - -
But in the end, the changes we make in our transportation lives will
matter mostly if we make them "as a collective." That is to say, instead
of trying to figure out every single aspect of our lives, a carbon tax
would have the effect of informing every one of those decisions,
automatically and invisibly. The fuel efficiency standards that the
Obama administration put forward and Trump is now gutting would result
in stunningly different outcomes. And so on...
- - -
We aren't going to solve our problems one consumer at a time. We're
going to need to do it as societies and civilizations, or not at all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/books/review/inconspicuous-consumption-tatiana-schlossberg.html
[Canada - anger about the future, a retreat, the report a warning]
*Threats, abuse move from online to real world, McKenna now requires
security*
- - -
Much has been written about the online abuse and threatening behaviour
politicians -- especially female politicians -- and others in the public
eye face every day. But McKenna says as the heat around climate change
continues to grow, that abuse is going from anonymous online vitriol to
terrifying in-person verbal assaults.
- - -
Berman said the threats and attacks against her worsened after Alberta
Premier Jason Kenney launched his "war room," a $30-million project to
discredit people he says are using foreign funding to undermine Canada's
energy sector. Berman and others are being named by the Alberta
government and called enemies for opposing the oil industry.
"Since Jason Kenney announced his $30 million warroom to attack
environmental advocates & this poster of me was held up at his press
conference I have had death threats, misogynist & sexual attacks on
social media," she tweeted in June. "This is what that kind of fear
mongering & hate does."
An attached image shows a sheet of paper with a photo of her speaking
into a bullhorn in front of a banner reading "NO TARSANDS PIPELINE."
Below the photo are the words "Tzeporah Berman: Enemy of the oilsands."
Kenney didn't hold it up but a supporter introducing him at a
pro-oilsands news conference in June did.
- - -
McKenna said she doesn't call this sort of thing out often because she
fears giving abusers attention. In 2017, she did stop to call foul when
Conservative MP Gerry Ritz referred to her on Twitter as "Climate Barbie."
The insult was coined by the right-wing website, The Rebel, shortly
after McKenna was named environment minister and has been used in
hundreds, if not thousands, of insults hurled her direction.
Ritz, a former agriculture minister who has since resigned from
Parliament, deleted his tweet and apologized for the slur when it was
met with outrage.
McKenna said the fact that climate-change deniers have now verbally
attacked Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, proves
just how low some will go to discredit their opponents.
People's Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier was among them, accusing
Thunberg in a tweet of being mentally unstable. He later said he wasn't
trying to insult her, just show that she was a pawn being used by adults
to put an unassailable face on their lies that climate change is a
human-caused emergency.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/threats-abuse-move-from-online-to-real-world-mckenna-now-requires-security-1.4582441
- - -
[read this next]
*As Risky Finances Alienate Investors, Fracking Companies Look to
Retirement Funds for Cash*
By Sharon Kelly - July 25, 2019
A year ago, Chesapeake Energy, at one time the nation's largest natural
gas producer, announced it was selling off its Ohio Utica shale drilling
rights in a $2 billion deal with a little-known private company based in
Houston, Texas, Encino Acquisition Partners.
For Chesapeake, the deal offered a way to pay off some of its debts,
incurred as its former CEO, "Shale King" Aubrey McClendon, led
Chesapeake on a disastrous shale drilling spree. Shares of Chesapeake
Energy, which in the early days of the fracking boom traded in the $20
to $30 a share range, are now valued at a little more than $1.50...
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/07/25/shale-drillers-investors-encino-pension-funds-risks
- - -
[Exxon knew in '72]
*"There is no doubt": Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By
Late 1970s*
https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/04/26/there-no-doubt-exxon-knew-co2-pollution-was-global-threat-late-1970s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKa2KldglM
[BBC sees article from the Conversation]
*Visions of a globalised future with renewable energy are wholly
unrealistic unless we change the economy.*
By Alf Hornborg From The Conversation
6 September 2019
Over the past two centuries, millions of dedicated people -
revolutionaries, activists, politicians, and theorists - have yet to
curb the disastrous and increasingly globalised trajectory of economic
polarisation and ecological degradation. Perhaps because we are utterly
trapped in flawed ways of thinking about technology and economy - as the
current discourse on climate change shows.
Rising greenhouse gas emissions are not just generating climate change.
They are giving more and more of us climate anxiety - public concern
over climate change in the UK, for example, is at a record high.
Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate.
Scientists from all over the world tell us that emissions in 10 years
must be half of what they were 10 years ago, or we face apocalypse.
School children like Greta Thunberg and activist movements like
Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But
what should we do to avoid disaster?...
- - -
National authorities might establish a complementary currency, alongside
regular money, that is distributed as a universal basic income but that
can only be used to buy goods and services that are produced within a
given radius from the point of purchase. This is not "local money" in
the sense of the Local Exchange Trading System (Lets) or the Bristol
pound. With local money you can buy goods produced on the other side of
the planet, as long as you buy it in a local store, which in effect does
nothing to impede the expansion of the global market. Introducing
special money that can only be used to buy goods produced locally would
be a genuine spanner in the wheel of globalisation.
*The only way to change the game is to redesign its most basic rules*
This would help decrease demand for global transport - a major source of
greenhouse gas emissions - while increasing local diversity and
resilience and encouraging community integration. It would no longer
make low wages and lax environmental legislation competitive advantages
in world trade, as is currently the case.
Re-localising the bulk of the economy in this way does not mean that
communities won't need electricity, for example, to run hospitals,
computers and households. But it would dismantle most of the global,
fossil-fuelled infrastructure for transporting people, groceries and
other commodities around the planet.
Solar power will no doubt be a vital component of humanity's future, but
not as long as we allow the logic of the world market to make it
profitable to transport essential goods halfway around the world. The
current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to
stand any chance, the global economy must be redesigned. The problem is
more fundamental than capitalism or the emphasis on growth: it is money
itself, and how money is related to technology.
Climate change and the other horrors of the Anthropocene don't just tell
us to stop using fossil fuels - they tell us that globalisation itself
is unsustainable.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190905-how-localisation-can-solve-climate-change
*This Day in Climate History - September 8, 2003 - from D.R. Tucker*
September 8, 2003: The EPA denies a petition by the International Center
for Technology Assessment to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the
Clean Air Act, setting off a four-year legal battle that culminates in
the Supreme Court's Massachusetts v. EPA ruling.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/FR-2003-09-08/03-22764/content-detail.html
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